The present invention relates to communications equipment, and, more particularly, to Internet-based telephony.
The Internet today primarily carries data and image traffic. A small but potentially high-growth area is to have the Internet carry live voice conversations. This is a particularly attractive alternative for international callers, since the international long distance rate is still "very" high. In such an application, a calling party with a suitably-configured personal computer typically accesses an access platform (also known as an "Internet server" or "gateway"), which completes the call to the called party over the local public-switched-telephone-network.
In order to support live voice conversations, audio is typically encoded and formed into packets for transport using an Internet Protocol. Today, there are several vendors (e.g., VocalTec, DigiPhone, and Lucent Technologies' Elemedia) that each provide a different signal processing application to form these audio packets. Each signal processing application typically comprises a proprietary speech-coding algorithm and/or specific hardware. The end result is that one vendor's signal processing application for forming audio packets may not be compatible with another vendor's signal processing application. As such, a priori knowledge of which vendor's signal processing application is being used is required to support an Internet-based audio call. Typically, this requires that the above-mentioned access platform is pre-configured to support a particular type of speech-coding algorithm. For example, the access platform may only support one type of speech-coding algorithm--to the exclusion of others--or the access platform may assign communications resources to particular types of speech-coding algorithms.